New font: Great for New Testament Studies

Brill, the publishing house, have released a free font, which is great for New Testament studies. It contains 5,100 characters, including comprehensive Greek, a fair amount of Cyrillic and Arabic, the basic characters of a dozen or so other languages (from Telegu to Hebrew), and several Christian or other religious symbols.

The only problem (and it's a big problem), is that Windows does a pretty bad job of rendering it on screen. It prints fine (and looks fine on screen in an application that fully supports Open Type), but looks pretty awful on everything else. I presume Macs won't have the problem.

http://www.brill.nl/news/brill-typeface

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Comments

Rosie Perera

Very nice!

It looks OK on screen to me in Word (though granted, only at larger font sizes; at 14pts and below it looks pretty gross; haven't tried it in Logos):

I couldn't find the Hebrew characters (in Word's Insert Symbol box). How did you get at them?

JimTowler

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335240#Comment_335240

I downloaded thisBrill font and installed on my Windows Vista Laptop, with Logos 4.5a Beta 4.

It looks thin and weak and not at all nice when small. And I do not like it when larger either: thin and weak to my eyes.

It does not appear as a selectable option for the Greek or Hebrew font choice within Logos 4.5a.

In short - I am back with old settings and dont expect it will be useful to me. YMMV.

Rosie Perera

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335256#Comment_335256

I downloaded thisBrill font and installed on my Windows Vista Laptop, with Logos 4.5a Beta 4.

It looks thin and weak and not at all nice when small. And I do not like it when larger either: thin and weak to my eyes

I also can't get it to show up in the font dropdown in Notes. I wonder whether Logos simply doesn't support OpenType fonts at all.

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335261#Comment_335261

It appears in the Notes font list for me, but isn't an option for Greek. I had to restart Logos after installing the font to get it to show up.

Mitchell

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335280#Comment_335280

I put together a quick comparison of a few Greek fonts, using 1 Corinthians 6:12-13 from NA27 as the sample.

Greek Font Comparison

This screenshot was taken on a Mac, so YMMV if you're on Windows (the two operating systems antialias fonts differently).

For my money, I'm sticking with Gentium or Palatino. I think I like Gentium a bit better for Greek, but Palatino is my favorite overall font for body text in Latin characters so I might start using that across the board for consistency. To my eye, SBL Greek and Brill look a bit sloppy, but that may just be me.

Mark Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335317#Comment_335317

Mitchell, that is a good comparison. I agree that Brill is not so attractive. I like the 'openness' of Palatino Linotype, but will probably stick with Gentium, too.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335317#Comment_335317

Thanks for that comparison Mitchell. It inspired me to do a larger one on Windows, using all the fonts I have that support a decent range of Greek characters. Personally, I'm a great fan of Gentium, which I think looks fantastic for Roman characters too. Not having to change font when you switch from Roman to Greek is a great time-saver. I've no idea where some of these fonts have come from, so I'm sure not everyone will have all of these. You can click on the image for a bigger version.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335240#Comment_335240

I couldn't find the Hebrew characters (in Word's Insert Symbol box). How did you get at them?

Use Character Map, Advanced View, and then group by Unicode Subrange.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/335256#Comment_335256

A note to anyone who's attempting to use Brill in Word or Logos and is disappointed. Those apps are converting it to a bitmap, and it renders badly - even at large point sizes. It will print OK, but will never look good on screen. Below is a comparison of 10pt Brill, converted to a PDF, then magnified 800%. The top two lines were converted from Word by CutePDF, which has rendered it properly. The second two lines were converted to PDF using Word's built in function, which you can see has converted it to a bitmap and rendered it badly.